BBC: Adam Curtis’ The Trap

juni 6, 2007

The first part of the series goes back to the origins of this phenomenon and that is the paranoid environment of the Cold War. After World War II, the bureaucracies that existed to regulate unrestrained capitalism started to be challenged. The free-market economist Friedrich von Hayek (an inspiration for Thatcher) argued that the use of politics to plan society was more dangerous than capitalism and led to tyranny, using the Soviet Union as an example. He advocated a system where individuals followed their own self interest and government played little part. The Market was everything, what he called a «self-directing automatic system» where everyone persued their own gain and there was no room for altruism.